So much said about littoral combat ship, yet much is still misunderstood

The Independence (foreground) and the Freedom, first two ships of the Navy's new littoral vessel class. The Independence arrived in San Diego on May 2, the first time the two ships were in the water together. The Navy took the opportunity to take a photo off the San Diego coast.
— U.S. Navy

The Independence (foreground) and the Freedom, first two ships of the Navy's new littoral vessel class. The Independence arrived in San Diego on May 2, the first time the two ships were in the water together. The Navy took the opportunity to take a photo off the San Diego coast.
/ U.S. Navy

The Independence, the second of the Navy's new littoral combat ships, arrived last week at its home port of San Diego. At least 16 littoral ships eventually will call San Diego home, including the Freedom, which arrived in 2010.

The U.S. Navy’s littoral combat ship program is as revolutionary as it is controversial. Born almost a decade ago, the small, fast warships designed to quickly reconfigure to serve several mission sets have not had an easy entrance into the fleet. Two years after the first ship was put to sea, the program still faces blistering criticism in Washington and a quiet unease in certain corners of the Navy.

The nuances of LCS were lost in the long and public battle between Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics courting the Navy to pick their own hulls. Lockheed’s Freedom class used a design based on a super-fast yacht, while General Dynamics based its design on aluminum fast ferries built by its partner Austal (General Dynamics later dropped out of the competition, leaving Austal as the prime contractor). The prize was to build the 54 ships that would account for about a fourth of the future Navy’s strength. Late in 2010, the Navy decided to build 10 of each hull in an unprecedented budget move worth up to an estimated $8.96 billion for all 20 ships.

Much has been written about the program, but in large part the LCS is among the most misunderstood in the U.S. military. For starters: The Pentagon, the Navy and industry can’t even agree how to pronounce the name. Most pronounce the first word as LiTORal, which according to every dictionary pronunciation guide I’ve seen is dead wrong. When senior officials pronounce littoral correctly, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey and Sen. John McCain have done, pundits who don’t know better take to Twitter to ladle out derision. “John McCain wants more ‘Literal Combat Ships,’ ” wrote one defense journalist on Feb. 14.

The relatively minor point is endemic of a host of misconstructions of what the ships and the systems of the LCS endeavor to do.

In the past, the Navy and shipbuilders designed ships around weapons systems. The Arleigh Burke-class destroyers were built around the Aegis missile system, and the Ohio-class submarine was built around 24 Trident DII nuclear-tipped missiles.

The LCS does the opposite. The weapons systems are designed to conform to modular spaces on board the ship. The idea is a hull can become a minesweeper, or a sub hunter or a platform to fight drug runners or small-boat threats by swapping out modules and crews. An engineer told me on a visit to the Independence that he describes the concept like an Xbox: The ship is the console and the mission packages are the games. And like an Xbox, the hulls are only as good as the games.

The benefit is ships can be quickly upgraded with capabilities and be tailored to missions. However, outside a small Danish Navy ship, the modular concept is largely untested. Integration of the packages has faced several delays due to the time it took to select the hull and critical technology failures in developing the ship’s mission packages.

In 2010, Freedom set sail from Mayport, Fla., for an inaugural deployment with an incomplete surface warfare mission package. A joint missile system the Navy was developing with the Army was delayed and ultimately canceled, and instead the Navy installed berthing for a Coast Guard law enforcement detachment to undertake drug interdiction missions in U.S. Southern Command. The minesweeping package has also suffered delays due in part to the reliability failures of an unmanned semi-submersible designed to patrol mined waters. The system is crucial to the Navy as its current minesweepers are among the oldest and most obsolete ships in the fleet.